Category Archives: Opinion

14 Talks I Would Like to Attend This Summer

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Here is just a quick list, off the top of my head, of some of the topics I would like to see someone do talks about at security events this summer. If you are in need of a research topic, or something to dig into for a deep dive, give one of these a try. Who knows, maybe you will see me in the audience. If so, then feel free to sit down for a cup of coffee and a chat! 

Here’s the list, in no particular order:

  1. machine learning,  analytics in infosec
  2. detection capabilities with nuance visibility at scale
  3. decision support from security analytics & automated systems based on situational awareness
  4. rational controls and how to apply them to different industries
  5. crowdsourcing of policies and processes – wiki-based approaches
  6. internal knowledge management for security teams
  7. tools for incident response beyond the basics
  8. tools and processes for business continuity after a breach – show us your guide to “Ouchies!”
  9. attacker research that is actually meaningful and that does NOT revolve around IOCs
  10. skills and capability mapping techniques for security teams and their management
  11. new mechanisms for log management and aggregation beyond Splunk & SEIM – how would the death star handle logs?
  12. near-real time detection at a meaningful level – even better if admins can make decisions and take actions from their iPhone/iWatch, 😛
  13. extrusion/exfiltration testing capabilities & metrics-focused assessment approaches for testing exfil robustness
  14. network mapping and asset discovery techniques and tools – how would the death star map their IT networks? 🙂
Give me a shout on Twitter if you want to explore these together – @lbhuston.

Three Things That Need Spring Cleaning in InfoSec

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Spring is here in the US, and that brings with it the need to do some spring cleaning. So, here are some ideas of some things I would like to see the infosec community clean out with the fresh spring air!

1. The white male majority in infosec. Yes, I am a white male, also middle aged…. But, seriously, infosec needs more brains with differing views and perspectives. We need a mix of conservative, liberal and radical thought. We need different nationalities and cultures. We need both sexes in equity. We need balance and a more organic talent pool to draw from. Let’s get more people involved, and open our hearts and minds to alternatives. We will benefit from the new approaches!

2. The echo chamber. It needs some fresh air. There are a lot of dropped ideas and poor choices laying around in there, so let’s sweep that out and start again. I believe echo chamber effects are unavoidable in small focused groups, but honestly, can’t we set aside our self-referential shouting, inside jokes, rock star egos and hubris for just one day? Can’t we open a window and sweep some of the aged and now decomposing junk outside. Then, maybe, we can start again with some fresh ideas and return to loving/hating each other in the same breath. As a stop gap, I am nominating May 1, a Friday this year, as Global Infosec Folks Talk to Someone You Don’t Already Know Day (GIFTTSYDAKD). On this day, ignore your peers in the echo chamber on social media and actually go out and talk to some non-security people who don’t have any idea what you do for a living. Take them to lunch. Discuss their lives, what they do when they aren’t working, how security and technology impacts their day to day. Just for one day, drop out of the echo chamber, celebrate GIFTTSYDAKD, and see what happens. If you don’t like it, the echo chamber can come back online with a little fresh air on May 2 at 12:01 AM EST. How’s that? Deal? 🙂

3. The focus on compliance over threats. Everyone knows in their hearts that this is wrong. It just feels good. We all want a gold star, a good report card or a measuring stick to say when we got to the goal. The problem is, crime is an organic thing. Organic, natural things don’t really follow policy, don’t stick to the script and don’t usually care about your gold star. Compliant organizations get pwned  – A LOT (read the news). Let’s spring clean the idea of compliance. Let’s get back to the rational idea that compliance is the starting point. It is the level of mutually assured minimal controls, then you have to build on top of it, holistically and completely custom to your environment. You have to tune, tweak, experiment, fail, succeed, re-vamp and continually invest in your security posture. FOREVER. There is no “end game”. There is no “Done!”. The next “bad thing” that visits the world will be either entirely new, or a new variant, and it will be capable of subverting some subset or an entire set of controls. That means new controls. Lather, rinse, repeat… That’s how life works.. To think otherwise is irrational and likely dangerous.

That’s it. That’s my spring cleaning list for infosec. What do you want to see changed around the infosec world? Drop me a line on Twitter (@lbhuston) and let me know your thoughts. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a safe, joyous and completely empowered Spring season!

3 Things I Learned Talking to InfoSec People About Crime

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Over the last several years, I have given many many talks about the behavior of criminal rings, how the criminal underground operates and black market economics. I wanted to share with my audiences some of the lessons I have learned about crime. Many people responded well and were interested in the content. Some replied with the predictable, “So what does this have to do with my firewall?” kind of response. One older security auditor even went so far as to ask me point blank “Why do you pay attention to the criminals? Shouldn’t you be working on helping people secure their networks?”  I tried to explain that understanding bad actors was a part of securing systems, but she wouldn’t hear of it…

That’s OK. I expected some of that kind of push back. Often, when I ask people what they want to hear about, or where my research should go, the responses I get back fall into two categories: “more of the same stuff” and “make x cheaper”, where x is some security product or tool. Neither is what I had in mind… 🙂 

Recently, I announced that I was taking this year off from most public speaking. I don’t think I will be attending as many events or speaking beyond my podcast and webinars. Mostly, this is to help me recover some of my energy and spend more time focused on new research and new projects at MicroSolved. However, I do want to close out the previous chapter of my focus on Operation Aikido and crime with 3 distinct lessons I think infosec folks should focus on and think about.

1. Real world – i.e.” “offline” crime – is something that few infosec professionals pay much attention to. Many of them are unaware of how fraud and black markets work, how criminals launder money/data around the world. They should pay attention to this, because “offline” crime and “online” crime are often strongly correlated and highly related in many cases. Sadly, when approached with this information – much of the response was – “I don’t have time for this, I have 156,926 other things to do right now.”

2. Infosec practitioners still do not understand their foes. There is a complete disconnect between the way most bad guys think and operate and the way many infosec folks think and operate. So much so, that there is often a “reality gap” between them. In a world of so many logs, honeypots, new techniques and data analysis, the problem seems to be getting worse instead of better. Threat intelligence has been reduced to lists of IOCs by most vendors, which makes it seem like knowledge of a web site URL, hash value or IP address is “knowing your enemy”. NOTHING could be farther from the truth….

3. Few infosec practitioners can appreciate a global view of crime and see larger-scale impacts in a meaningful way. Even those infosec practitioners who do get a deeper view of crime seem unable to formulate global-level impacts or nuance influences. When asked how geo-political changes would impact various forms of crime around the world, more than 93% of those I polled could only identify “increases in crime” as an impact. Only around 7% of those polled could identify specific shifts in the types of crime or criminal actors when asked about changes in the geo-political or economic landscapes. Less than 2% of the respondents could identify or correlate accurate trends in response to a geo-political situation like the conflict in Ukraine. Clearly, most infosec folks are focused heavily ON THIER OWN STUFF and not on the world and threats around them.

I’m not slamming infosec folks. I love them. I want them to succeed and have devoted more than 20 years of my life to helping them. I will continue to do so. But, before I close my own chapter on this particular research focus, I think it is essential to level set. This is a part of that. I hope the conversation continues. I hope folks learn more and more about bad actors and crime. I hope to see more people doing this research. I hope to dig even deeper into it in the future.

Until then, thanks for reading, stay safe out there, and I will see you soon – even if I won’t be on stage at most events for a while. 😉

PS _ Thanks to all of the wonderful audiences I have had the pleasure to present to over the years. I appreciate and love each and every one of you! Thanks for all the applause, questions and, most of all, thanks for being there!  

Malware Can Hide in a LOT of Places

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This article about research showing how malware could be hidden in Blu-Ray disks should serve as a reminder to us all that a lot of those “smart” and “Internet-enabled” devices we are buying can also be a risk to our information. In the past, malware has used digital picture frames, vendor disks & CD’s, USB keys, smart “dongles” and a wide variety of other things that can plug into a computer or network as a transmission medium.

As the so called, Internet of Things (IoT), continues to grow in both substance and hype, more and more of these devices will be prevalent across homes and businesses everywhere. In a recent neighbor visit, I enumerated (with permission), more than 30 different computers, phones, tablets, smart TV’s and other miscellaneous devices on their home network. This family of 5 has smart radios, smart TVs and even a Wifi-connected set of toys that their kids play with. That’s a LOT of places for malware to hide…

I hope all of us can take a few minutes and just give that some thought. I am sure few of us really have a plan that includes such objects. Most families are lucky if they have a firewall and AV on all of their systems. Let alone a plan for “smart devices” and other network gook.

How will you handle this? What plans are you making? Ping us on Twitter (@lbhuston or @microsolved) and let us know your thoughts.

Podcast Episode 2 is Now Available

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In this episode we sit down with Mark Tomallo, from Panopticon Labs, and RSA’s Kevin Flanagan. We discuss mentoring, online crime, choosing infosec as a career and even dig out some tidbits from Mark about online gaming fraud and some of the criminal underground around the gaming industry. I think this is a very interesting and fun episode, so check it out and let us know what you think on Twitter (@microsolved, or @lbhuston). Thanks for listening! 

Listen Here:

Keep Your Hands Off My SSL Traffic

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Hey, you, get off my digital lawn and put down my binary flamingos!!!!! 

If you have been living under an online rock these last couple of weeks, then you might have missed all of the news and hype about the threats to your SSL traffic. It seems that some folks, like Lenovo and Comodo, for example, have been caught with their hands in your cookie jar. (or at least your certificate jar, but cookie jars seem like more of a thing…) 

First, we had Superfish, then PrivDog. Now researchers are saying that more and more examples of that same code being used are starting to emerge across a plethora of products and software tools.

That’s a LOT of people, organizations and applications playing with my (and your) SSL traffic. What is an aging infosec curmudgeon to do except take to the Twitters to complain? 🙂

There’s a lot of advice out there, and if you are one of the folks impacted by Superfish and/or PrivDog directly, it is likely a good time to go fix that stuff. It also might be worth keeping an eye on for a while and cleaning up any of the other applications that are starting to be outed for the same bad behaviors.

In the meantime, if you are a privacy or compliance person for a living, feel free to drop us a line on Twitter (@lbhuston, @microsolved) and let us know what your organization is doing about these issues. How is the idea of prevalent man-in-the-middle attacks against your compliance-focused data and applications sitting with your security team? You got this, right? 🙂

As always, thanks for reading, and we look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on the impacts of SSL tampering on Twitter! 

Podcast Episode 1 is Now Available

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This episode is about 45 minutes in length and features an interview with Dave Rose (@drose0120) and Helen Patton (@OSUCISOHelen) about ethics in security, women in STEM roles and career advice for young folks considering Infosec as a career. Have feedback, let me know via Twitter (@lbhuston).

 
As always, thanks for listening and reading stateofsecurity.com!
 
Listen here: 
 
PS – We decided to restart the episode numbers, move to pod bean.com as a hosting company and make the podcast available through iTunes. We felt all of those changes, plus the informal date-based episode titles we were using before made the change a good idea.

Cyber-Civic Responsibility

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More and more we are a folk who expect others to protect us from society’s ills and to take care of our dirty work for us. We have police and courts to protect us from violence and larceny. We take it as certain that someone will pick up our garbage, keep our electricity flowing and make sure that our water is clean. And rightly so! After all, isn’t that why we elect officials? Isn’t that why we pay all those fees and taxes that hit us from every side? Life is so complex now that no one has the mental and emotional resources to think and care about every little thing that affects us. We have to draw the line somewhere just to cope and remain sane.

Unfortunately, most of us have put information security and the unrestricted use of our delightful new cyber-toys on the wrong side of that line. We dismissively expect the ISPs, the software developers, the anti-virus personnel, the government, and who knows all else to keep our information secure for us. And they try their best. The problem is that “they” simply can’t do it. Although computer use seems like old and well established technology to many of us, it is really in its infancy and is expanding explosively in unexpected directions. None of the regulations, devices or software packages designed to secure networked computers really work well or for long. They are always too limited, too weak and too late.

The only thing that really has a chance of working is if we all start taking responsibility for our own share of the problem. We need to change our complacent attitudes and realize that it is our civic duty to become actively involved in this concern. It won’t be easy or pleasant. We will need to keep ourselves well-schooled on the subject. We will need to endure security procedures that make computer use a little less convenient and free. And we will need to keep close tabs on the regulators and manufacturers and demand that effective security becomes an integral part of the system. Remember, our place in the world and even our physical safety depends on it! Isn’t that worth a little of our time and patience?

This post by John Davis.

Young IT Professionals, Cybercrime, Script Kiddies & CyberWarriors, OH MY!

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Recently I came across a couple of articles that both centered on the potential roles that young people entering into the IT Security field may face. Some of them, for example, may be lured away from legitimate IT security jobs and into the world of cybercrime. Others may follow the entrepreneurial role and fight cybercrime alongside myself and other professionals.

I suppose such dichotomies have existed in other professions for quite some time. Chemists could enter the commercial or academic world or become underground drug cartel members, ala Breaking Bad. Accountants could build CPA tax practices or help bad guys launder money. Doctors could work in emergency rooms or perform illegal operations to help war lords recover from battle. I suppose it is an age old balancing act.

I am reminded of Gladwell’s Outliers though, in that we are experiencing a certain time window when IT security skills are valuable to both good and bad efforts, and a war for talent may well be waging just beyond the common boundary of society. Gladwell’s position that someone like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates could only emerge within a specific time line of conditions seems to apply here. Have we seen our IT security Bill Gates yet? Maybe, maybe not….

It is certainly an interesting and pivotal time isn’t it? These articles further solidified my resolve to close a set of podcast interviews that I have been working on. In the next couple of months I will be posting podcast interviews with teams of IT and Infosec leaders to discuss their advice to young people just entering our profession. I hope you will join me for them. More importantly, I hope you will help me by sharing them with young people you know who are considering IT security as a career. Together, maybe we can help keep more of the talent on the non-criminal side. Maybe… I can always hope, can’t I? 🙂

Until next time, thanks for reading, and stay safe out there! If you have questions or insights about advice for young security professionals, hit me up on Twitter (@lbhuston). I’ll add them to the questions for the podcast guests or do some email interviews if there is enough interest from the community.

Benefits of using TigerTrax to Monitor Your Industry

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Have you ever wanted to know what is being said in regards to your business or product line on social media? How about getting the scoop on a company prior to your big merger or acquisition? Perhaps you have a need for continual code of conduct monitoring for your business or franchise. These are but a few of the things that we at MicroSolved, Inc can provide for you and your company! MicroSolved has a whole host of proprietary software including TigerTrax, that will give your company an edge over your competition!

With our TigerTrax platform we can help provide you with a competitive advantage by receiving actionable intelligence about your product line from the social media hemisphere. Imagine scouring the entire population of Twitter, which boasts some 645 million registered users with over 115 million active users monthly. That is an enormous market that you can tap into with our help. A market where you can see where you think that your product line may be heading versus what people are actually talking about in regards to your product line. Imagine being able to fine-tune your marketing campaign based on our intelligence gathering ability!

In every business there are times whether for a short duration or a long term one where you may want us to provide you with code of conduct information about your employees. Perhaps their contracts clearly state what sort of things they may or may not post on social media and the internet; but also and more importantly you may want to know what everyone else is posting about them. We can help provide you that information. Our TigerTrax platform does in minutes what takes a roomful of employees days or weeks to do and in a very short time you can have actionable information that may be used to help protect your companies brand!

As you can see TigerTrax is a wonderful tool in your arsenal for providing actionable data that will enable you to adjust your marketing campaign or perform ongoing code of conduct monitoring. We can also perform threat intelligence, assess whether your intellectual property has been leaked online, and of course perform brand intelligence. As you can imagine we are only scratching the surface of what we at MicroSolved, Inc and the TigerTrax platform can do for you. So please if you need any assistance for your company feel free to contact us by sending an email to: info@microsolved.com.

This post by Preston Kershner.